Really large Time Machine backups all of a sudden - Google Chrome related?

[Hermolicious84]

Hi,

I've been using Time Machine to make backups to a Western Digital external ever since I got my Macbook Pro (12/2008). I haven't been modifying or creating many files on my computer recently, as I just finished school and mainly use it for web browsing. Nevertheless, my backups are about 250MB each, which is much larger than they used to be, and seems unreasonably large for doing nothing but web browsing.

I have been using the Google Chrome beta as my primary browser, but I can't tie the start of unusually large backups to the start of my Chrome usage, as I just noticed the large backups now, weeks after I started using Chrome.

I'm running Snow Leopard, and I recently formatted my Time Machine drive as it was running out of space, and started a new set of backups hoping that I might fix the problem. It's still doing it. Other info: my backup drive is connected all the time.

Does anyone have similar issues? Is anyone familiar with the way that Chrome saves browser data in a Time Machine unfriendly way?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[netnothing]

Download TimeTracker from here:

http://www.charlessoft.com/

It will let you examine Time Machine backup sets to see what it's backing up. I personally haven't had an issue with Chrome, although i don't use it much.

-Kevin

 

[Hermolicious84]

So, I haven't tried the program you suggested yet, but I decided to just close Chrome, go back to Firefox, and see what happens. Which, admittedly, I should have done before I even posted.

My backups for the last few hours look like this:

291 MB
324 MB
170 MB (time during which I closed Chrome)
875 KB

Wow. I'm going to turn off the 3 extensions I have and make sure those aren't at fault, and if it's Chrome itself I'm going to contact the dev team. That's a little ridiculous.

 

[esd]

It's a problem with the way Chrome stores History data. There's a bug report on it here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25959

You could solve the problem by going into Time Machine settings and adding an exception for ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default -- HOWEVER that means all your Chrome history, cookies, and preferences will not be backed up and you'll probably need to reinstall Chrome if your computer ever crashes.